And I like the passion that people have when they're trying to prove they can make a movie or be a movie star.

It's so funny, all the similarities that we have [with David Copperfield] of being obsessed young people and finding a way to be around the people doing what we want to do.

You have to write a lot of scripts to get any scripts that are worth making.

That's very important to me as well: presentation and how people perceive you, the visual of how things look, your posture. I learned that from [Bob] Fosse and Jerome Robbins, from all the great theater directors and the Busby Berkeleys. You overdeliver: visually, emotionally.

If we really talked about what's wrong with you, you'd need a 7-1/2-hour movie and nobody would know what category to put it in!

Any music star would be singing about his lost love. A movie would be about a relatable incident; it wasn't an untouchable magic dragon box. It was something that people could relate to, and when I vanished a girl, it would be a story about a girl that left me, or a cutting into pieces would be a date with a magician. I wouldn't just vanish a girl in a shower, I would do the shower scene from Psycho [1960] with a [Alfred] Hitchcock cameo.

Humor is his defense mechanism, so that would allow me to talk about some serious subjects, but get a lot of hilarious jokes in.